Trinidad: Lumberer, friend found murdered in Cumuto

(Trinidad Guardian) A lum­ber­er by trade, Bryan Fe­lix, 40, was asked by his neigh­bour Aleem Khan, 50, on Fri­day to help cut down some logs and build up a wood­en struc­ture on a par­cel of land in Cu­mu­to.

 
The pair, who both lived off the Cu­mu­to Main Road in Coryal Vil­lage, re­turned home on Fri­day evening, hav­ing com­plet­ed some work.

On Sat­ur­day, they went back out with the same in­ten­tions.

How­ev­er, they nev­er re­turned home.

Vil­lagers from their com­mu­ni­ty con­duct­ed search­es to find the two men— Khan a fa­ther of two, and Fe­lix a fa­ther of one.

But their search end­ed in tragedy yes­ter­day morn­ing when the bod­ies of the two men were both found near where they were last seen.

Po­lice told the Guardian Me­dia that at 7 am yes­ter­day, Sgt Williams and a par­ty of of­fi­cers from the Cu­mu­to Po­lice Sta­tion re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that two bod­ies were found at Sin Ver­guen­za Road, Coryal Vil­lage.

The of­fi­cers went to a bushy area ap­prox­i­mate­ly a quar­ter mile off the north­ern side of the road­way where they ob­served two male bod­ies ly­ing in the bush­es with what ap­peared to be gun­shot wounds to their heads.

The wounds ap­peared to have been made by a shot­gun.

The bod­ies were viewed by a dis­trict med­ical of­fi­cer and or­dered re­moved from the scene at about 1.15 pm.

An au­top­sy is ex­pect­ed to be per­formed to­day at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­ter to con­firm what caused their deaths.

When the Guardian vis­it­ed Coryal Vil­lage, yes­ter­day, rel­a­tives and friends of the two men had gath­ered in their num­bers to pay their fi­nal re­spects.

The over­ar­ch­ing con­sen­sus at the two wakes, was shock.

No one un­der­stood why this had hap­pened.

“When we woke up this morn­ing we weren’t ex­pect­ing to hear this, nah. We were ex­pect­ing to hear maybe they got lost or some­thing. But not this,” Guardian Me­dia was told by one vil­lager.

Fe­lix, rel­a­tives said, was mar­ried and had one daugh­ter.

He was a lum­ber­er all his life, trained in the field by his fa­ther.

They said that the 40-year-old was a lov­ing, kind, car­ing and con­sid­er­ate man.

“Any ad­jec­tive you can think of be­sides be­ing bad, that would de­scribe Fe­lix. That was the type of man he was,” rel­a­tives said.

When asked why any­one would want the 40-year-old man dead, rel­a­tives were baf­fled.

“He wasn’t in any­thing. We don’t know what hap­pened here. The most we can say is we heard there was a dis­agree­ment over the same land that they were work­ing on, but to say it would lead to mur­der… I can’t say,” rel­a­tives said.

In their sor­row, Khan’s rel­a­tives gave sim­i­lar com­ments.

“The most we can say is that my fa­ther got land from his fa­ther, and it was on­ly re­cent­ly prop­er­ly placed un­der his name. Now that in­di­vid­ual start­ed to grade it down and thing and asked my fa­ther if he could make a small road­way through my dad’s land. My dad told him go ahead. How­ev­er, the road got big­ger and big­ger, and then was com­ing too much in­to my dad’s land, and he said ‘boy, you have to stop that’. That is the on­ly thing I can think of. But I don’t know if that is linked. But my dad was just such a qui­et man, we just are strug­gling try­ing to fig­ure out how this hap­pened,” Guardian Me­dia was told.

Khan’s wife died less than two months ago af­ter her ap­pen­dix rup­tured.

Khan’s un­time­ly death has plunged his fam­i­ly and the rest of the vil­lage in­to deep­er mourn­ing.